PLOS ONE does not accept a free-text paragraph of author contributions. Since adopting the CRediT taxonomy, the journal requires every author to be assigned one or more of 14 standardised, machine-readable contributor roles at submission, and those role tags are published with the article. This structured, mandatory model sits in contrast to journals that still rely on a narrative “author contributions” statement, and it is why PLOS ONE is now a reference case for what machine-readable authorship metadata looks like in practice.
The credit taxonomy plos one implementation is one of the clearest examples of a publisher moving contributor-role reporting from prose to structured data. CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a fixed set of 14 role labels — such as Conceptualization, Data Curation, Formal Analysis and Writing – Original Draft Preparation — used to tag, rather than narrate, what each named author actually did on a research output.
- What is the CRediT taxonomy?
- How did PLOS ONE make CRediT mandatory and machine-readable?
- CRediT vs free-text contribution statements: what changes?
- What does the evidence show about CRediT data in practice?
- Answer-first Q&A
- Implications and what comes next
What is the CRediT taxonomy?
CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014 as a way to replace vague authorship credit with a fixed, shared vocabulary. The standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, which formally defines the 14 roles and their scope.
Each role describes a discrete type of research labour — not seniority, not authorship order, and not a value judgement on contribution size. A single author can hold several roles; a single role can be shared by several authors. The taxonomy is designed to be tagged against a person, ideally via an ORCID iD, so that contribution data can be indexed, aggregated and machine-read rather than only read as prose.
- Conceptualization
- Data Curation
- Formal Analysis
- Funding Acquisition
- Investigation
- Methodology
- Project Administration
- Resources
- Software
- Supervision
- Validation
- Visualization
- Writing – Original Draft Preparation
- Writing – Review & Editing
How did PLOS ONE make CRediT mandatory and machine-readable?
PLOS states plainly on its authorship policy page that it “has adopted the CRediT Taxonomy to describe each author’s individual contributions to the work,” and that the submitting author is responsible for entering every author’s contributions at the point of submission. This is not an optional supplementary note — it is a required submission field, checked before peer review can proceed.
Because the roles are selected from a closed list rather than typed freely, the resulting metadata is structured at source. PLOS publishes the completed role set with the final article as tagged data, which downstream systems, indexers and bibliometric researchers can parse without needing to interpret prose. PLOS pairs this with a mandatory ORCID iD for the corresponding author, linking machine-readable roles to a persistent researcher identifier rather than a name string alone.
This mandatory-and-structured model is precisely what distinguishes PLOS ONE’s approach from journals that reference CRediT only as a recommended framework for a free-text “author contributions” paragraph.
CRediT vs free-text contribution statements: what changes?
Free-text contribution statements ask authors to describe their roles in a sentence or short paragraph, with no controlled vocabulary. The result is legible to a human reader but effectively opaque to software, and inconsistent from one journal — even one article — to the next.
| Feature | PLOS ONE: mandatory CRediT tagging | Free-text contribution statement |
|---|---|---|
| Vocabulary | Closed set of 14 defined roles (ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022) | Open, author-written prose |
| Machine readability | Structured, taggable per author | Requires manual or NLP interpretation |
| Consistency across articles | Uniform role labels journal-wide | Wording varies by author and article |
| Submission requirement | Mandatory field at Editorial Manager submission | Often optional or loosely enforced |
| Bibliometric usability | Enables large-scale contribution analysis | Poorly suited to aggregation |
The practical effect is that a mandatory, tagged taxonomy turns “who did what” into queryable data, while a free-text statement remains a one-off narrative disclosure that satisfies transparency norms without generating reusable metadata.
What does the evidence show about CRediT data in practice?
Because PLOS ONE’s CRediT tags are structured and published at scale, they have become a dataset in their own right. Ding et al. (2021), writing in Scientometrics, used PLOS ONE’s tagged contributor roles to build and evaluate a co-author credit-allocation method — work that would not have been possible against free-text statements alone.
Separately, Larivière and colleagues analysed division of labour in biomedical research using CRediT-tagged data, a study now cited more than 135 times, underscoring how structured role data has become a recognised input for research-on-research and responsible-assessment work. Nature’s 2025 retrospective on the taxonomy’s first decade likewise frames CRediT’s core value as enabling “trust, integrity and responsible research assessment” — a claim that depends on contribution data being structured enough to analyse, not merely readable.
- CASRAI originated CRediT in 2014; NISO now stewards it as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022.
- PLOS requires CRediT role assignment as a mandatory submission field, not an optional note.
- Ding et al. (2021, Scientometrics) built a credit-allocation model directly from PLOS ONE’s CRediT tags.
- Larivière et al.’s CRediT-based division-of-labour study has been cited over 135 times.
Answer-first Q&A
What is the CRediT taxonomy?
The CRediT taxonomy is a standardised system of 14 roles for describing what each author contributed to a research output. CASRAI originated it in 2014; it is now formally stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. Journals that adopt it ask authors to select applicable roles rather than write free prose.
What are the 14 roles in the CRediT taxonomy?
The 14 roles are Conceptualization, Data Curation, Formal Analysis, Funding Acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project Administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – Original Draft Preparation and Writing – Review & Editing. Authors can hold multiple roles, and roles can be shared across a byline.
Is PLOS ONE a credible journal?
PLOS ONE is a fully peer-reviewed, indexed journal published by the non-profit Public Library of Science. Its mandatory, structured CRediT and ORCID requirements are part of a broader editorial-integrity framework that includes ICMJE-aligned authorship criteria and COPE-based authorship-dispute handling.
Is it good to publish in PLOS ONE?
For authors who want transparent, machine-readable contribution records, publishing in PLOS ONE means every co-author’s role is captured in structured form and published alongside the article — a stronger provenance record than a narrative statement, though editorial fit and scope should still guide the submission decision.
Implications and what comes next
For research administrators and institutions, PLOS ONE’s model is a working template for what “compliance-ready” contributorship metadata looks like: mandatory at submission, tied to ORCID, and published as structured data rather than prose. Funders and institutions assessing individual contribution to collaborative outputs gain a queryable record instead of having to parse inconsistent narrative statements.
For publishers still using an optional or free-text model, the PLOS ONE case demonstrates that a mandatory, role-based submission field is operationally achievable at very high volume — PLOS ONE has published hundreds of thousands of articles under this requirement. As more journals move toward structured contributorship, the gap between “CRediT as a suggested framework” and “CRediT as an enforced, machine-readable field” is likely to become the more meaningful dividing line in authorship transparency than whether a journal mentions CRediT at all.
Research administrators evaluating a journal’s authorship rigour should check not just whether CRediT is referenced in author guidelines, but whether role assignment is enforced as structured, mandatory metadata — the distinction this case study sets out to make clear.